


Aware

by ZiGraves



Category: Welcome to Night Vale
Genre: Bad Things Happen To Carlos, Hurt/Comfort, M/M, Sickfic
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-11-13
Updated: 2013-11-13
Packaged: 2018-01-01 09:57:12
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,132
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1043466
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ZiGraves/pseuds/ZiGraves
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Carlos experiences one of Night Vale's charming local viral infections.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Aware

**Author's Note:**

> If you like this, I am on both tumblr and steam as Zigraves. Come and bother me.

The coffee is wrong.

Carlos peels his tongue off the roof of his mouth where he’d been trying to scrub the taste away. Too sweet, too hot. He could have sworn he’d made it normally, but it wouldn’t be the first time he’d gotten something wrong in his early morning distraction.

And hour and a fresh cup later, the coffee is too cold, too bitter. He wrinkles his nose and tips it down the drain and tries for a third cup, with no greater success. It is grainy on his tongue, and when he settles for water there is still an unpleasant tang to it. Chlorine, perhaps, or unusually heavy mineral concentration.

Carlos is fighting off the start of a headache by the time lunch rolls around, unable to find anything to drink that doesn’t leave cloying syrup on the back of his tongue or a metallic tang in his sinuses. The sandwich he’d packed that morning is stale, the bread is rough and hard. The salad greens are bitter, and the chicken both dry and tough. It is possibly the most unpleasant sandwich he’s ever had, and compounds the thudding in his head even while he’s making a note to just keep getting takeaway instead of trying to be healthy by packing his own lunch.

When the light under the microscope refuses to find a balance between too bright to look at and too dark to see, he gives up. The day has thrown one thing after another at him, and he’s hungry and thirsty and his head is still thudding as though hungover at all the too-intense stimulus of light, noise, movement. The texture of his labcoat scratches at his skin where the cuff rides over the soft, worn cotton of today’s ancient shirt. There is a label in the shirt’s neck, which he has never noticed before, and it itches like loose fiberglass.

He makes his apologies to his labmates, who do not seem to be suffering the same, and drives carefully home. The glare on the road is vicious, and the noise under the tyres makes him fear that the car is already overdue for a checkup or service though he’s barely had it a year yet.

The inside of his apartment is blessedly dark, by comparison, and quiet. His labcoat rustles, over-starched, when he hangs it up, and he winces at the noise his shoes make as he kicks them off. After another moment’s thought he peels off the shirt with the scratchy label and the trousers with the irritating seam. It’s dark and quiet, and for a little while he is able to just lie on his bed and wait for the unpleasant headache to pass.

Dark and quiet and warm.

Too warm. He’s sweating into his sheets, which are as scratchy and rough as his labcoat, and for the first time Carlos begins to suspect it’s something worse than just a bad day and a bit of dehydration getting to him. He finds his phone, wincing again at the noise of the thing, at the unpleasantly sticky plasticky texture of the case, at the way it beeps and chirps and buzzes and burbles, all too loud and too much and the buzz of it when he gets an answering text from Cecil is enough that he drops it and steps back on reflex until it has fallen quite, quite still again.

The letters, white on green on black, are bright and harsh, but just about legible if he takes care to squint.

_Leave your door unlocked. Will be there shortly. Run a lukewarm bath. Didn’t realise you hadn’t been vaccinated, Mister Scientist! :P_

Vaccinated. Carlos fixes on the word, even as he drops the phone back in the coat pocket to try and muffle any further noise it makes. He runs the bath as instructed, wondering if maybe he should run it cool just in case, wasn’t that what you’re meant to do to bring down a fever? Is it a fever? He is warm, but it feels like the ambient room temperature is set too high, not like the burning from the inside just under the skin that he associates with colds and flus. He tests it by going to the fridge, which is too cold, and which smells badly enough to make him retch though he can’t recall it being so bad that morning when he made the sandwich.

Hypersensitivity, then.

Okay. That’s a symptom. He can work with that. He just needs to work out how to treat it, find out what it’s a symptom of. Cecil will arrive soon. Cecil will know.

He occupies the remaining time trying to ignore the harshness of the acrylic carpet under his feet or the sticky too-coldness of the linoleum as he systematically unplugs every single nonessential electric item in the house. The mosquito-like hum of the television and laptop charger fall silent, and the previously unnoticed whir of the DVD player, faint but intolerable, is likewise banished. Soon there is nothing but the fridge, and Carlos glares at the evilly purring thing before turning his back on it and stalking, on feet that do not want to touch the floor, back to the bathroom. He wants to sit down, but the pressure of the thin rim of the bath is uncomfortable. The cold plastic - so much plastic, everything is plastic, vile plastic - of the toilet lid is impossible against his skin, but so is the increasing harshness of his boxers, every tiny movement generating a fresh bit of friction that feels as though it must be leaving welts.

He peels them off and stands uncertainly by the bath, naked and now trending toward too cold rather than too hot. He shivers, and reconsiders sitting on the too-hard edge of the bath when the front door opens and shuts with what he recognises as uncharacteristic gentleness but still flinches from the noise of.

Carlos is still trying to balance on the bath edge without actually putting any pressure anywhere when Cecil pads in on sock soles, wearing an outlandish outfit that looks to have been chosen specifically for the twinned values of softness and silence. The brash colours are mercifully muted in the relative dimness of the bathroom with its one small window and lack of buzzing artificial light. He smiles, and speaks in a whisper.

“Poor lovely Carlos. Into the bath with you, sweetness, the water will help. It won’t feel like anything at all, and will take your weight.”

It’s possibly the nicest thing that Carlos has ever heard, though he still can’t help a wince at the sensation of the meniscus of the water breaking beneath his foot and the way it clings to his dry skin until Cecil gently dribbles cupped handfuls of water over him and he can no longer feel a clear line between water and air. It’s still cold. But not so cold as the air, and that is enough.

He wets gummed lips with a thick tongue and fails to clear his throat.

“Do you know-” he stops, curling back into the water from the sound of his rough voice against the bathroom tiles, and tries again at a volume barely above breathing. “Do you know what’s wrong?”

“I had it when I was six. Or perhaps I was vaccinated. One of those,” Cecil smiles again, and scoops another handful of water to pour over Carlos’ shoulders. Somehow the water is soundless in a way that defies physics, and Carlos doesn’t quite care just then because the quiet and absence of sensation is almost holy. “It’s worse when you get it as an adult.”

“What is it?”

“Awareness. Someone must have a child at home that’s too young for the vaccine and carried into work with them. You know, this is why the Council has those quarantine projects! It may take ten years of total isolation from all living contact, but they definitely won’t be contagious afterwards, and it’s very character-building for small children.” Cecil risks a small, light kiss to Carlos’ forehead, but his chapstick is heavy and oily in a way it has never been before, and he manages not to look offended as Carlos tries to scrub the remnants of touch off. “It’ll take a few days. I’ll come by with food you can probably eat, later. You might have a few existential crises tomorrow when you become aware of your insignificance in the greater scope of the universe, but it should be gone by Thursday.”

The porridge is perfectly smooth, perfectly bland, and exactly balanced at a point of neither warm nor cool. It is possibly the best thing Carlos has ever eaten.

Tuesday comes and goes, the day dividing itself neatly between lying perfectly still on sheets practically coated in unscented fabric softener and long hours in the bath. Cecil’s promised existential crises are nothing Carlos has not faced already as part of a freshman astrophysics course, and he is both relieved and unimpressed that the mental symptoms of Awareness are not nearly so difficult to handle as the physical symptoms.

It hits its lowest point on Thursday, when Carlos braves the vile tactility and noise of the phone to call Cecil, sobbing, brightly and keenly and painfully aware of emotions he has never examined too closely before. Cecil is on his way over before Carlos has even managed to drop his phone in the bath, and Carlos throws himself into arms that are stripped of unwanted fabric. Skin, he finds, is tolerable, the uncomfortable warmth of another living thing is a distraction from the horror of dedicated thought.

Science is _beautiful_ , and so beautiful that it hurts, and the words for it stream from Carlos’ lips to Cecil’s ears in a desperate effort to exorcise them and have those theorems banished for their inescapable neatness and profundity.  
Mathematics is _perfect_ , so perfect that his mind cannot encompass it and he starts sobbing again at the ineluctably pure concept of geometry, which digs sharp lines and angles into his brain until he feels it has dissected him. His hands tremble, fingers digging tight into Cecil’s arms.  
Cecil is _everything_. He is _everything_ , and the love of Cecil tears itself from Carlos’ mind and heart and lips. Carlos whispers it all ‘til his voice cracks in the hope he can express enough of it that love will stop hurting him soon, because he has never been so aware and does not know if he wants it to stop or wants it to take him down whole and drown in it.

Carlos wakes up to find that his throat really hurts. Also that the bed is warm and pleasant, and the bedsheets are fantastically soft. It takes him several minutes of half-comatose thought to piece all this together and realise the Awareness has broken, and has left in its wake a softer, less consuming awareness.

He is aware of Cecil, for example, sat on the floor by the bed and deep asleep, and of the warmth that blooms somewhere inside when he looks at Cecil. He is aware of the sheets, which are soft, and which Cecil brought when none of his own were remotely tolerable, and that Cecil must have lifted him out of the bath and dried him off and put him to put when he’d exhausted himself rambling.

He is aware, and if he lets himself think too hard on it he can feel the edge of that previous hurt, but it’s blunted. Tolerable. Welcome. He likes the hard pull that’s left in his chest, though he’s not so fond of the soreness in his throat and it’s the clatter of the glass of filtered water he takes from the nightstand that wakes Cecil, who starts and slides off balance with a thud.

“Hey,” Carlos murmurs, reaching out in instinctive sympathy, and Cecil’s eyes flick briefly over him with the keen appraisal of an impromptu nurse before Carlos finds himself with both arms full of the man and a deep, soft voice cooing over him.

“I’m so glad it’s broken at last. I haven’t seen anyone that bad before. Your poor throat, my poor lovely Carlos.” Cecil’s hand is hesitant as it reaches up to stroke through his hair, until Carlos leans into the touch and they revel in it, in being able to withstand touch again, in being aware of the fineness of it all without it becoming overwhelming.

“Thanks for looking after me,” Carlos manages, after more water and several abortive swallows that fail to clear his throat. Cecil’s wide, wobbly smile is more than enough answer, and Carlos resists asking whether he said anything too embarrassing after he lost track of his words.

He’s pretty sure Cecil understands.

**Author's Note:**

> If you like this, I am on both tumblr and steam as Zigraves. Come and bother me.


End file.
